Reverse Growth

The abandoned greenhouse reeked of rotting roses and formaldehyde. Lucas trembled in Ayla's lap, his adult frame folded into the posture of a child caught in a nightmare. Moonlight streamed through shattered glass panes, etching the wolf-claw birthmark on his back into a pulsing shadow on the moss-covered floor—an exact mirror of Lila's scar.

"Look familiar?" Ayla's voice cracked as she pressed a rusted scalpel to his spine. The tool still bore traces of Selena's fingerprints, stolen from her childhood dissection kit.

Lucas whimpered, fingers clawing at her bloodstained sleeve. "Don't... cut..."

His voice was twelve years old again.

(Three miles east, Selena's hunters torched Lila's nursery. Smoke rose in glyphs matching the birthmark's curves.)

II. Greenhouse Ghosts

Ayla's flashlight beam caught the claw marks on the greenhouse wall—adolescent Lucas scoring his height each summer until the night Selena welded silver caps to his vertebrae. His current trembling mimicked that convulsion, the memory trapped in muscle.

She pried open his fist. Inside lay a glass shard engraved with coordinates to Selena's first lab. "You hid this when you were twelve," she whispered, "right after she melted your collarbones."

Lucas flinched. His birthmark oozed bioluminescent fluid that spread like ink across Lila's diary pages.

(Real-time: Lila's hospital monitors flatlined as her birthmark dissolved. Nurses found her sketching the greenhouse's layout in seizing cursive—coordinates matching the glass shard.)

III. Reverse Archaeology

The birthmark pulsed under ultraviolet light, projecting holograms of twin cribs. Baby Selena clawed at Lila's bassinet, her nursery rhymes warping into the fake vampire tongue.

"Keresha val mori," Lucas chanted, rocking. "Means... means..."

Ayla slammed his hand onto the scalpel. Blood activated the hologram's hidden layer: Selena injecting six-year-old Lila with wolfsbane serum. The birthmarks ignited simultaneously.

"Means 'sister eats lies,'" Ayla hissed. "You taught her that code when she couldn't speak. You."

(Flashback: 12-year-old Ayla finding Lucas stitching Lila's split lip. "Father says she's defective," he'd mumbled. "So I'm fixing it.")

IV. Fractured Symmetry

Lucas convulsed. His birthmark split open, regurgitating Lila's baby teeth wrapped in copper wire. Each molar pulsed with Selena's voice recordings: "My perfect prototype."

Ayla wired the teeth to a car battery stolen from Selena's childhood go-kart. The shock revived Lucas' adult voice for thirteen seconds:

"Lab... under... lake..." His eyes rolled back. "She kept... copies..."

The teeth exploded, etching a map of geothermal vents into the greenhouse floor.

(Lila's IV bag began boiling. Her birthmark dissolved into the same vents pattern.)

V. Reverse Engineering

Dawn leaked through bullet-riddled glass. Lucas clutched Ayla's wrist, his grip alternating between childlike fear and feral strength.

"Scared," he whispered.

She pressed his palm to her birthmark-less back. "Join the club."

Outside, Selena's drones carpet-bombed the lake with acid. Steam rose in the shape of Lila's looping signature—forged in the baptismal records Lucas had burned at twelve.

(Epilogue: Ayla pocketed a tooth shard glowing with Lila's DNA. Somewhere, a nursery mobile made of wolfsbane vials began spinning.)

-

Rainwater dripped through the greenhouse's skeletal frame, pooling in the hollow of Lucas' collarbone. Ayla counted his vertebrae through torn fabric—each surgical scar still precise after eighteen years.

"Look." She dragged his shivering hand to his lower back. The birthmark pulsed under stormlight, its wolf-claw edges dissolving into Lila's infant footprints.

Lucas curled tighter. "Hurts."

"Good." She flicked the scalpel against his scar. Bioluminescent fluid oozed out, forming a topographic map on the floor. "You two shared cribs. Shared needles. Now you share this."

He whimpered, kicking over a jar of pickled wolfsbane. The liquid ignited, casting shadows of Selena's first experiments—twins chained to dialysis machines, swapping blood through rusted tubes.

Outside, acid bombs churned the lake into a foaming mirror. Ayla watched their reflections warp: her adult self cradling twelve-year-old Lucas, his birthmark projecting Lila's real-time EKG flatline.

"Stay with me," she muttered, wiring his molars to a car battery. "Time to unlearn everything she taught you."

The first shock made him scream in Selena's voice.